


Astra Inclinant, Sed Non Obligant

by Maiden_of_the_Moon



Series: Of Cloudless Climbs and Starry Skies [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: As created by tumblr's beanpots, Day/Night AU, Drama, M/M, Music, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9595040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maiden_of_the_Moon/pseuds/Maiden_of_the_Moon
Summary: “In that case,” the King of Night husks, visible now only by the phantasmagoric dregs of Vega, “would you… Would you sleep with me?”[Day/Night AU. Sequel to "Of Cloudless Climbs and Starry Skies."]





	

**Disclaimer:** Nopes-into-the-sun.jpeg

**Author’s Note:** What the shit happened here. Uh. I dunno, man. Last time I was inspired by a line of poetry; this time I saw a Latin quote and… here we are? Stuff is very easily lent to this AU, I guess. 

**Warnings:** Sequel to _Of Cloudless Climbs and Starry Skies._ Which was an offering to Beanpots and their Day/Night AU. Which this is as well. A lot of music and dancing metaphors because… um. Because. I don’t know either. No beta. I’m sorry.

  
**XXX**

**Astra Inclinant, Sed Non Obligant**

_The Stars Incline Us, They Do Not Bind Us_

**XXX**  


Time is a structured waltz: One, two, three; three, two, one. Step, step, step. Its dance is that of royalty, of gods, and the Kings had fallen into pace with its beats long ago. It is a part of them. It is a part of _everything_. Its meter is that of the heart, and Time is at the heart of all.

The erratic rhythms chosen are kept by their pulses, those swift tempos mirrored by changes in moods, in seasons, in epochs. They can hear the count: 

_One, two, three…_

Passing seconds buzz beneath their skin, heated music and hotter lifeblood thrumming in their ears. The spider lilies that line the Twilight Path sway to the incessant melody, ball gown blossoms sussurating against one another. Stems bend, together and away. Petals touch, singing. Lips touch, yearning. 

Bodies touch—

_…three, two, one._

Blooms bows to their partners, then bow to their lieges. They bow until they begin to wilt, until they start to writhe and thrash and wither upon the sward, until their heads are beating against their majesties’ shins and they are begging and beseeching as the clock ticks past zero. The moon is sinking down, now; the sun is sliding up. Celestial bodies are coming apart, ripping their electrum aureole at the seams. They have separated. 

They need to be separated.

Pollen-dusted stamens stretch, thin and prettily grotesque. A breeze, a twitch, and suddenly the flowers are more spider than lily, snagging palls of morning-mist gossamer and veils of tenebrous stardust. 

Viktor thinks of webs and the flies that they trap. 

Yuuri pulls away, his lilac lips bruised dawn-rose.

“The eclipse is over,” he says. It is a realization. There are moonflowers twined around the whisper, a dewy shimmer to his skin. His hair—mussed into tempestuous waves, peaked and damp and that same shade of black as midnight over deep waters— smells of sea-salt, smells of dreams. The sliver-moons in his eyes, on his throat, add highlights to his love-flushed features, and Viktor notes that Vega crowns his constellation corona. More crystal-bright than any imperial jewel, that single star outshines all but the auroras in the King of Night’s gaze. 

The endless, swirling colors in that stare coil around Viktor’s heart. They trap it. Ensnare it, much as something else ensnares his ankles, its tugging insistent. The Earth shifts beneath their feet. The Earth spins and it stumbles and it…

“…it is over,” Viktor echoes, acknowledging. There is the heat of the sun on his breath, but his aura has lost its shine. He is Day personified, yes; that day is dark and melancholy. 

The eclipse is over.

**X**

Time stretches both ways, marked by signatures and periods and lines of fate and destiny. Often, mortals try to organize its bars with numbers or events. Speeches, laments, war cries, and hymns service as lyrics, sung over and over and over again until they are forgotten by history. But whatever does or does not happen, as always and for always, the melody itself remains Time’s. It plays and they march. It plays and they march. It plays, and Yuuri murmurs a thought about ledger lines: Drawn close enough to be one entity, but forever running in parallels. They are connected by notes, but can never meet. Music is made of their sorrows.

Theirs is a sad song. 

The Twilight Path stretches both ways, worn into the ground by footsteps, by florae, by millennia. Dusky plumes of mote-spangled light hang in curtains over the lands, ethereal and shifting but never to lift. Shadows stretch out into eternity, touching in fashions their casters cannot. 

Fingertip brushes fingertip, tugging at heartstrings. A sound escapes Viktor, pitched high and longing. 

It is such a sad song.

**X**

_Da capo:_

Once upon a time there was darkness, and the darkness was frightening. Sun and Moon, yet newly born, wept and wept and wept, and their tears became the sea. The waters churned, the waters rose, and the waters were just as terrifying as everything else—of which there was yet very little—, and poor Sun and pitiful Moon knew not what they should do. They clung to each other, suspended over the abyss on spider threads. They clung to each other, and this was the first comfort that they knew.

The second was Time’s music. 

Lullabies became nursery songs, and nursery songs became arias. Troubles forgotten, Sun and Moon danced in circles around one another, giggling and laughing and vibrantly aglow. The light of their joy illumed the world. It illumed _worlds_. Time changed its airs again, and the two found themselves waltzing, dizzying and dazzling, across the expanse of the universe, stars falling from their hair and planets beading on their brows. Lost garments lay in drapes across galaxies, their color vitalizing the empty monochrome expanse. Robes, smocks, layers of silk; in the heavens above Earth an abandoned ribbon was left to shimmer, milky and opalescent.

The two bodies fell into each other. They fell away. And when they fell into orbit, Day and Night were brought into the world: Opposites personified. Opposites _attracting_. Unlike their creators, Day and Night are intangible; they are malleable and impermanent, starting and finishing and starting again, repeat repeat repeat, and in so being are bound to Time by design rather than whimsy. They might even be gifts, in retrospect: Love notes in thanks for the music. For when the twins appear, it is with minds already molded out of melodies, with lines of music stamped into their palms and threaded through their limbs. Their hearts beat, and what they hear is too delicate and hypnotic and lovely to ignore. 

They cannot ignore it; it is a part of them. They should not ignore it; it is part of _everything_. They will not ignore it, for if they should, if they should stop, then—

Then…

Then? 

_It begins at the end. It ends at the beginning._

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

**X**

_She walks in beauty like the night_  
 _Of cloudless climbs and starry skies_

The song is old now. The poem is older. The man who wrote it is the oldest and long since dead. Days pass, and weeks pass, and months pass; years, then decades, then centuries, and these truths become nothing but truer, truer, truer. 

_And all that’s best of dark and bright  
Meets in her aspects and her eyes;_

Whatever others might think, Time is not meaningless to Viktor. It does not leave him unaffected. However, its meanings and affects are different for him— for Yuuri—, than they are for the mortals who live and die in the realms below. 

_Thus mellow’d to that tender light  
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies_

Step, step, step. Mantels rustle, lilies whisper, gilded adornments jangle like the links of a shackle. There is a hand in the small of Viktor’s back, shoving him forward when his knees wobble and his feet resist. When he stumbles, a shooting star streaks across Yuuri’s brow: A moment there and a moment gone. And though Viktor wishes just as hard as he can, his token bouts of resistance do nothing to disrupt their march. 

_She walks in beauty_

Echoes from previous lives plink and pluck through the eons, lilted lyrics playing on a loop inside his skull. A mobius descant, serenaded by residual piano and the hollow hum of a violin that has already molded into nothingness. 

_Like the night_

The King of Night closes his eyes, Pisces’ indigo gleam bringing out the violet of his lashes, the blue of his blush. His head tips back, farther and farther, further and further, until Viktor can see the fragile arc of his chin, its contours haloed by the full moon choker branded upon his throat. It blazes, impossibly bright. It _burns_ , swelling, hotter and bigger and—

_Of cloudless climbs_

With the agonizing intensity of a supernova, constellations sear their shapes upon his crown— Aquila and Aquarius; Circinus and Pyxis; Corona Borealis—and the evening is bleached to whiteness. 

_And starry skies_

**X**

Time is structured. The Moon is tangible. The Sun is real. But Day and Night, Night and Day, they are flowing and ephemeral and impermanent, they touch and bleed into one another in ways that their creators never have, never will, and twilight—this twilight— this Twilight, is a coda, a movement, an end.

_It begins at the end._

“This is not an eclipse,” Viktor says when his mouth is his own again. When he is breathless, winded. Wind. It whips, funneling through the lilies, sending their crimson petals flying through the air like meteorites. Like blood. Flowerheads have been drawn into another dance, circling each other as Sun and Moon always wanted and Day and Night always hated. 

_It ends at the beginning._

Yuuri smiles. The moon is in his teeth as much as in his eyes, on his throat, in the void over their heads; in the beloved, bitty blemishes that blunted nails grind into Viktor’s thorn-pricked palms. When his lover speaks, both the world and his words spiral inward like moonflowers on the close: 

“No,” he agrees. “This is not an eclipse.”

This is… 

Blossoms spin. Gowns spin. Stars spin, streaks of silver scored into the sky as constellations start to smear and pop and vanish. Yuuri blinks and they are gone, blurred into non-existence like quarter notes beneath tears and brine and sea foam. Music warps in the shell of their ears, the cadence of the universe thrown off. It had been beautiful once. So many things were beautiful, once. 

_Once upon a time…_

“Viktor,” the King of Night murmurs, his dark grip tight on alabaster wrists, “I have been thinking.” 

_Of cloudless climbs and—_

The heavens are a melting mess of pearly hues and rich tinctures: Scarlet bleeding into cerise, which then melds into goldenrod, which quickly becomes butter-cream, then ochre, then periwinkle, peach and amaranthine. Colors clash, roiling, only to dissipate; an uncomfortable amalgam of brightness and gloom, of warmth and cold, leaves the Twilight field ashen-gray. 

“You and I,” Yuuri muses, firefly cinders wafted by his whispers as they rise into the velvet void, “we’ve been listening to this cradlesong of Time’s since before we can remember. We have lived to it, loved to it. But… Though it is a lullaby, we have never slept to it. I… I have never slept at all, really.”

“Neither have I, my dear.” 

Viktor touches his cheek: First with one hand, then with the other. The cool that crests the other’s flesh is that of the gloaming. The heat beneath it is of cosmoses winking out. Yuuri’s corona gutters, and the moon is no longer anywhere to be found. 

Something in the sky is falling. Falling away. Falling apart. 

Yuuri falls into Viktor and confesses, “I am tired, my Lord.”

“Understandably,” the King of Day coos, his beam mirthless. He strokes obsidian tresses, once, twice, three times. There is no countback because there should not need to be one. They should not be here. In the distance, ivory keys are shattering against the ground, gut-cord strings snapping like spider threads. Viktor holds more tightly to his lover and murmurs, “After a dance as long as ours, I am exhausted, too, Yuuri. I am so weary that I can barely stand.” 

A chuckle wheezes past trembling lips, one of empathy more than amusement. His sob is more joy than sorrow. Tears join the myriad of obstacles that try to separate the two when Yuuri nestles into Viktor’s hand, and there is apology as much as love in the kiss that is pressed to the end of his lover’s lifeline. 

“In that case,” the King of Night husks, visible now only by the phantasmagoric dregs of Vega, “would you… Would you sleep with me?” 

In that instant, Time stops. A heart stops. The music stops, and in its place there is the incandescent roar of the sun as it bursts in Viktor’s chest: Fiery, bedazzling, perfect. He has turned red in the day’s dying light, and in that final moment, he is absolutely _radiant._

“There is nothing I want more.”

When the sun bursts again, it is in the sky above.

And there is silence.

**XXX**


End file.
